


written beneath the skin

by triplesalto



Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Curses, Deception, Extra Trick, F/M, Identity Porn, Manipulative Relationship, Paranormal, Secret Identity, Secrets, ToT: Chocolate Box, ToT: Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-25 10:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12529804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplesalto/pseuds/triplesalto
Summary: After the birth of his fifth daughter, Mr Bennet has a confession to make.





	written beneath the skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fenellaevangela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenellaevangela/gifts).



When their first daughter is born, his young wife smiles complacently, as if she has done a grand thing. “Lawks, Mr Bennet,” she says, coyly, the babe a mewling red thing cradled in her arms. “Look what we two have made together.”

When their second daughter follows on the heels of the first, he holds the elder up to the bed to see her sister, absentmindedly stroking her wispy curls. “This is your sister Lizzy, Jane,” his wife says, her finger caught in the infant’s tight grasp. “You must teach her to mind.”

The third daughter is scrawny, her face screwed up in a wail. “I did hope for a boy this time,” his wife says. The birth was hard, and his wife’s face is older now than it was; there are lines around her eyes. “Next time it will be a boy,” she says, and turns her head on the pillow, motioning for the nurse to take the squalling child away.

Their fourth daughter sees the elder three confined to the nursery, away from the sounds and smells of the birthing chamber, but the eldest evades the nanny during the final excitement and finds her father in the library. “Shall I have a little brother, Papa?” she asks, her gentle face alight with curiosity. He pats her head and tells her to wait and see.

After their fifth daughter is delivered, the ferocity of her cries outmatching all of her elders, the doctor has a quiet word with the master of the house. The master listens, and sits for a while in his chair after the doctor has left, his thoughts far away.

“So, Mrs Bennet,” he says, when he visits her that afternoon. The child has been whisked away by the nurse, and all that remains is his wife, drawn and tired. She is still beautiful, still young, but today she is haggard. He reminds himself not to mention it. 

She looks at him, and he finds to his surprise that there are tears in her eyes. The doctor had said that she was overcome, but he had not expected this. He shuffles his feet. “The birth of the child went well,” he says awkwardly. “You are to be congratulated.”

“Congratulated,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. “Five daughters. Five. I did so think this one would be a boy.”

He casts about for something to say. “It is as the Lord decrees.”

She does not heed what he intends as comfort. “I have failed you,” she says. Her eyes are cast down, her fingers laced tightly together. “I must have done something wrong. Perhaps I was uncharitable, or had wicked thoughts. I have offended the Almighty, and he has blighted my womb.”

He looks at her in surprise. He had not thought his wife to be superstitious, or to hold by the milksop cant the weedy minister stutters from the pulpit on Sundays. She has always been such a bright, arch thing, full of chatter and laughter; he had not thought her to have a serious bone in her body, nor yet a religious one. 

“I do not know how to reform, Mr Bennet,” she says, and there is a sob in her voice. For once, her silliness, which he has more than once thought of as her armour against the daily arrows of the world, has been laid by. She is a snail without a shell, a quivering mollusk. “My mother always says that God punishes the wicked. We may have _fifty_ daughters, and never the son we long for.”

“Fifty would be a great number,” he says, quailing at the prospect. 

But this is the wrong thing to say, for his wife dissolves in a paroxysm of tears, and he knows not how to stop them. 

Looking down at her, he remembers how young she was when he met her. A girl of sixteen, credulous and romantic, scarce come from the schoolroom. It had been so easy to persuade her of his love. Her simplicity bolstered his suit; it is not surprising, perhaps, that it has also persuaded her of this old wives’ tale, and robbed her composure. How long has she believed herself at fault? Since the third daughter? The fourth?

He does not love her, has never loved her. But she has given him much; so he finds something to give her in return.

“Mrs Bennet,” he says, making the title an awkward caress, as he sits on the bed and takes her hot hand between his own. “I should have confessed long since.”

Her tears are arrested in a moment. “Confessed?” she breathes, and hiccoughs.

He realises that in another moment she will have convicted him of breaching their marriage vows, and hurries to disillusion her. “My father… when my father was young, he made a tragic error.”

She has never met the man, who died a year before the new Mr Bennet of Longbourn met the young Miss Gardiner, with her pretty face, engaging manner, and respectable four thousand pounds. Ten years the former master of Longbourn has been gone. Now she has forgotten her tears, keen to know his story.

“He was young and handsome, and he raised a girl’s expectations. She had no dowry, however, and his own father having been a gambler, he needed to marry well to restore Longbourn’s fortunes. When he spurned her love, the girl’s heart was broken.”

She hangs on his words, her eyes bright with curiosity. 

“It is a sad tale. She believed for a time that he would return to her, and built her life upon those fragile hopes. At last she heard that he had not only married, but that his new wife had brought forth a son. Rejected and ruined – for he had dallied with her – she drowned herself in a lake. A passing farmer pulled her from the water, but she lived only long enough to curse my father with her dying breaths.”

“What was the curse?” Her interest is ghoulish, indecently avid. He turns his eyes from her. 

“She blighted my family forever. You sought to enrich Longbourn, she said. Then hear my curse: Longbourn is lost to you. Never again shall your family bear sons. Daughters may you have – let Longbourn be bled for their dowries. But the infant you hold in your arms today shall be the last boy born to your line, though you have a thousand wives, and a thousand daughters.” 

“And the babe was you,” she breathes.

“The babe was me.”

There is silence in the room. A sunbeam falls across the bed, highlighting the hectic colour of her cheeks.

“I should have told you long ago,” he says, aiming for contrition. “I did not know you blamed yourself. There is naught at fault in you!” There is much at fault in her, but not this. “It is my family that is cursed.”

She laughs, a little shaky laugh. “I do not know that I believe in curses, Mr Bennet.”

He shrugs. “Nor do I; but my father sired only me and my late sister, and I have sired five daughters.” He touches her hand where it lies limp on the bedsheets. “I do not wish you to lose your bloom and suffer such pain, labouring in vain to present me with a son. We have five daughters; I am content.”

She was eager in bed at the beginning of their marriage, insatiable and full of merriment. As time has passed, however, her demands have become much less constant, slackening with each new babe. Now he thinks she looks relieved, though perhaps every new mother might look so, if presented with her husband’s forbearance of her wifely duties. “Are you certain?”

“I am content,” he repeats, and leans over her to kiss her forehead.

He leaves her deep in contemplation of his tissue of lies.

❧

Safely returned to his library, he breathes freely once more. 

Ten years it has been, since he came to this place. Ten years since he stumbled, injured nigh to death, through the door of the bewildered Mr Bennet, his supposed father. Abandoned by his kind, in pain, hunted by his enemies, could he have done else than secured his own safety? It had been the work of a moment to strike the older man down, and the work of another to devour his heir. By the time the servants had burst into the room, they had found their master lying dead on the hearthrug of a sudden paroxysm, and the young master bent over him, crying out in dismay. 

The doctor had been satisfied of the dead man’s weak heart, and consoled his son that nothing could have been done. They buried him with all ceremony, and the new Mr Bennet went abroad for a year to overcome his grief, dismissing the servants and shuttering Longbourn. When he returned, he retained new servants, who had not known him as a boy. Painful memories, they said of him in Meryton.

Now he looks at the place of peace he has built for himself, here at the heart of Longbourn, and is content.

That first year abroad was difficult. This world is too loud, its colours too hectic, and the young Mr Bennet’s skin had sat uncomfortably on him. It was too tight, too unfamiliar. He had longed to shift, to be once more himself; but if the shape he had taken guaranteed him a place in this world, and a comfortable competence when he returned to England, it also disguised him from his pursuers. It would take him some years, as this species reckoned time, to recover enough strength to resume the battle once more. Until then, he would be forced to hide. He had always been one of the best shifters in his regiment – they had called him the Chameleon; ever since that fateful night, he has been using all of his skill to maintain his camouflage.

He thinks of his marriage, and smiles. It is a strange smile, and if a human saw it they might shudder, a prickle of unease sliding down their neck, something primal. 

His marriage had been his master stroke. An unmarried bachelor in Longbourn might cause suspicion; his pursuers would be looking for anything out of the ordinary, and a sudden death followed by sudden misanthropy might be just that. So he had looked for a complaisant bride, and had found young, beautiful, silly, simple Miss Gardiner, so flattered by the step up from lawyer’s daughter to manor of her own. Hardly out of the schoolroom, she had known little of men; any slips he made would be attributed to his own idiosyncrasies, and not cause any general alarm. Unafflicted by intelligence and engagingly self-absorbed, she would take joy in her consequence and maintain the household’s social duties with little necessary input from him. 

Yet her greatest contribution to his happiness has always been that which she has most readily provided: her womb.

Together Mr and Mrs Bennet have brought forth five daughters. No male child of the union can form – it is a biological fact that the two species can create only female children in the first generation. But his daughters, the hybrids that swell Longbourn with shrieks and shouts and giggles, carry their heritage in their genes, written beneath the skin. 

In time his daughters will marry. Ten or fifteen years, perhaps. He is of a particularly long-lived species; fifteen years is the blink of an eye. In twenty they will have families of their own. In thirty his first grandsons will be beginning to come into their powers, and he will be there to explain, to exhort, and to teach. Until at last he is recovered once again, and strides forth to unmask and face his pursuers, with an unlooked-for army of shifters at his back.

The Chameleon sits in his chair, at the heart of his web, and smiles. 

Above him, there is laughter in the nursery.

❧


End file.
